Joomla! Development: Website Pre-Launch Checklist

Broken links are bad both for user experience and SEO. Users can leave your site if they get stuck with a broken link. Use link checkers to find such links and remove them or redirect to correct pages.

Your website will never look professional with spelling and grammar mistakes. Learn best practices to improve your writing.

Imagine you have developed great responsive template that looks awesome in Safari, but what about those who use Firefox, Chrome or even IE? Have you tested on other OS platforms?

You should make sure that all site users land to the same URL whether or not they use www or not. This can be achieved by 301 redirect.

Think of those who do not use mouse to browse pages or use screen readerS. How comfortable will they feel on your website?

Is it easy to read information on your pages? Check your pages for color contrast.

Add your site to uptime monitors to track whether your site is still alive.

Add tracking code to learn your audience and try to understand how they communicate with the site to provide them better service.

Number of mobile users is growing each day, so make sure that your website is friendly enough for mobile devices.

Viewport meta-tag and @viewport rule control layout on mobile browsers. Be sure to use them if you need predictabe behavior.

Correct field type will result in correct behavior across platforms and devices. E.g. special characters on screen keyboard for email, or digit keyboard for phone number field.

You do not need to own different types of devices to test your application. Use emulators instead.

Google provides a number of rules to optimize your page load. And be sure they use it while ranking your website in search results.

There is also a number of parameters you may optimize with tool from Yahoo. Unlike Goole they have documentation that shows how score is calculated.

Use the service to find out what can you fix in server response headers to optimize page load.

Both Google and Yahoo recommend to optimize your images. Use following tools to reduce image size without loosing quality.

Make sure you have the latest version of Joomla! If not, update it!

You may perform periodic checks to be sure that site is clean of malware.

When you develop or customize an extension be sure to protect your site from CSRF attacks.

Create a new user, give it super admin permissions, then delete old super admin user for changing ID of the admin user. Since Joomla! 2.5.5 you may change admin name during installation.

Do not use easy-to-guess passwords. But make them simple to remember.

Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess and make sure RewriteEngine is set to "On".

Do not let automatic scanners find out that you use Joomla by hidding or protecting /administrator/ folder.

To block most common attacks it is suggested to establish advanced security using .htaccess file.

Check configuration.php file permissions. Set it to 644, or much better to 444.

If you still on Joomla 1.5.x, do not use the standard jos_ table prefix.

Do not promote that website is built on Joomla! and its version for security reasons.

If you go live with the site being established on development environment, a good idea would be to check /log and /tmp folders paths in "configuration.php"

You do not use them and do not update them. So they are potentially dangerous.

Look in your website structure for staging/development files and delete them (.psd, .bak, IDE files, copies etc.)

Markup pages in ways recognized by major search providers to improve the display of search results.

Check what data is extracted from your pages.

Check most important SEO criteria and calculate your grade for every page of website.

Once your page is correctly marked up, Rich Snippets will be displayed in Google search results.

Show search crawlers what content should be indexed and what should be removed from index.

Make use of 404 page by offering useful links and site structure.

Nowadays favicon is widely used, so be sure to change default Joomla!/template icon to your own one.

Use SEF extension to get human-readable URLs instead of address line with parameters.